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Part 3, Disorderly Beauty
The Destroyed City - Ossip Zadkine, 1951 (Rotterdam, NL)
Immanuel Kant, 1724 - 1804
Modern time has come.
The philosopher of the Enlightenment, Immanuel Kant,
develops in the 18th cent. a filosophy of beauty and taste.
Kant sees beauty not as a quality of a work of art,
but according to him beauty is created in the spectator’s mind.
This makes beauty to a subjective datum.
Beauty cannot be determined by an objective criterion.
In the lasting debate on art, beauty, and taste,
the role of women is far from negligible.
Self-portrait - Angelica Kauffmann, 1770
In their salons women ventilated their opinions.
The female appearance is not the beauty of the ratio
but the beauty of the hart.
Woman dressed as Vestal *** - Angelica Kauffmann, 1775/1800
The reverse of the Enlightenment is Romanticism.
Kant stated that enjoyment of beauty is entirely disinterested.
This justifies - regarding beauty -
the striving after freedom and boundlessness.
Essential is the attitude of mind,
the rules of classical beauty have lost their importance.
Sappho - Charles-Auguste Mengin, 1867
Jean-Baptiste de Jonghe, 1810
Josephus Augustus Knip, 1818
Caspar David Friedrich, c1825
Wijnandus Johannes Josephus Nuyen, 1838
Charles-Gabriel Gleyre, 1840
In Romanticism one searches for the strangeness, the unfamiliarity.
The preference for ruins,
lasting till the nineteenth century,
is related to the growing taste for formlessness,
incompleteness,
impairedness,
and defectiveness.
The eruption of Mt. Merapi at night, Java - Raden Saleh, 1865
In romanticism the term “the sublime” emerges.
The term especially refers to a greatness
with which nothing else can be compared
and which is beyond all possibility of calculation,
measurement or imitation.
This greatness is often used
when referring to nature and its vastness (Wikipedia).
Volcano’s, horrible abysses or mountain-ridges
may have a beauty in itself,
apart from all the distress
that attend these phenomena.
The experience of the sublime
is one of shiver followed by delight.
View of the Sermitsialik glacier - William Bradford, c1870
The Devil’s Bridge - Caspar Wolf, 1777
Wanderer above a sea of fog - Caspar David Friedrich, c1818
In the works of Caspar David Friedrich
the human being is depicted,
while enduring the sublime in nature.
As long as we don’t incur a risk,
we enjoy the shiver.
Chalk-cliffs on Fügen - Caspar David Friedrich, 1818
The nightmare - Johann Heinrich Füssli, 1781
Romantic beauty and the sublime are the forerunners
of what could be called “the era of disorder”.
Day-dreaming - Jozef Israëls, 1850
In this era new media develop.
Commercial cinema and advertisement
are the seed-plots of new ideals of beauty.
The first ever screen kiss, 1896 (Thomas A. Edison Compagny)
Rudolph Valentino (1895 - 1926) and Agnes Ayres
Louise Brooks (1906 - 1985)
Rita Hayworth (1918 - 1987)
Marlon Brando (1924 - 2004)
Marilyn Monroe (1926 - 1962)
James Dean (1931 - 1955)
Liz Taylor (1932 - 2011)
Brigitte Bardot (1934)
Robert Redford (1936)
Brad Pitt (1963)
Nicole Kidman (1967)
Olympia - Edouard Manet, 1863
In the 19th century swift art-movements develop,
succeeding each other swiftly
or merging into each other.
A fan of many different forms of beauty opens.
Nude in a landscape - Salvador Dali, c1923
Realism - Gustave Courbet, 1849
Impressionism - Claude Monet, 1872
Neo-impressionism - Georges Seurat, 1884/86
Post-impressionism - Vincent van Gogh, 1888
Symbolism - Carlos Schwabe, 1895
Fauvism - Henri Matisse, 1905
Art Nouveau - Elizabeth Shippen Green, 1908
Expressionism - Edvard Munch, 1893
Cubism - Georges Braque, 1910
Futurism - Giacomo Balla 1913/14
Dadaism - Kurt Schwitters, 1919
Bauhaus - Kandinsky, 1923
Art Deco - Tamara de Lempicka, 1930
Surrealism - Salvador Dalí, 1931
Magic realism - Carel Willink, 1939
Abstract Expressionism - Jackson ***, 1948
Pop-Art - Andy Warhol, 1962
Portrait of Isabel Rawsthorne - Francis Bacon, 1966
The sublime dominates pure beauty.
The sublime opposes pure form
and is related with the chaoticness,
mysteriousness,
darkness,
strangeness,
the unspeakableness,
strickenness.
In the sublime there is no contrast
between ‘beautiful’ and ‘ugly’.
It is related to the abjectness.
Beauty, connected with form, sereneness, harmony,
coherence and unity, threatens to become discredited.
But what can be said about beauty, nowadays?
What is beautiful reminds us of nature as such -
of what lies beyond the human and the made -
and thereby stimulates and deepens our sense
of the shear spread and fullness of reality,
inanimate as well as pulsing,
that surrounds us all.
Susan Sontag (1933 - 2004) 'An argument about beauty', 2002
>> J.M. Coetzee: I think 'beauty' is a very complicated word.
I think there is an original sense of the word 'beauty',
and then there is an extended sense.
And the original sense to me
has a great deal to do with
perfection, and perfection on a human scale.
It has a great deal to do in the first place
with the perfection of the human body,
the perfect thing.
The most beautiful thing in the first place,
is the perfect human body.
And I think that consolation ("troost")
is primarily connected with that sense of the word 'beauty'.
And for a man perhaps connected with the sense of feminin beauty
with ideas of...
nourishment,
of peace,
of renewal,
The renewal of the male in the female.
And I think there is a later sense of beauty, which...
would have been surprising to the Greeks, let us say.
Beauty applied to things that overwhelm the senses
that are much vaster than the human scale.
In esthetics I think the term that is used
for that kind of beauty is
the 'sublime', rather than just the beautiful.
But it is a very powerful sense of the word 'beauty' in our time,
and I think ever since the early 19th century or late 18th century.
Wild mountains, tumultuous seas,
great depths, great expanses.
And that kind of beauty is not, I think, consoling in itself
It is overwhelming rather than consoling.
>> Wim Kayzer: But if we are talking about the marriage
between beauty and consolation,
as I wrote you in my invitation letter,
did you experience those particular moments
of marriage between beauty, the body for instance,
and consolation?
>> J.M. Coetzee: I think that any human being must
at times
experience that marriage
in love.
Love is a very varied set of states,
and a very varied set of emotions,
but there are times in love
when it's exactly that that union of
reverential contemplation of beauty
and a sense of completely being at home
and completely being at peace
is exactly that marriage that occurs.